How to find nth occurrence of character in a string?

Solution 1:

If your project already depends on Apache Commons you can use StringUtils.ordinalIndexOf, otherwise, here's an implementation:

public static int ordinalIndexOf(String str, String substr, int n) {
    int pos = str.indexOf(substr);
    while (--n > 0 && pos != -1)
        pos = str.indexOf(substr, pos + 1);
    return pos;
}

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Solution 2:

I believe the easiest solution for finding the Nth occurrence of a String is to use StringUtils.ordinalIndexOf() from Apache Commons.

Example:

StringUtils.ordinalIndexOf("aabaabaa", "b", 2)  == 5